Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
within them. Increased need for efficient collaboration is also necessary in other
business processes, for example collaborative product design, collaborative online
sites and similar. Ad hoc, fast and efficient collaboration is often impeded by hetero-
geneous and inflexible IT infrastructures that hinder efficient exchange of data and
deployment of inter-company processes.
Partner or Community Grids are a specific type of Grids that can provide support
for the establishment of a VO based on IT resource sharing among collaborating
entities. Even though Partner and Community Grids have similar functionalities,
they might support different types of VOs: Partner Grids are rather established in
business context among companies or universities with common goals and defined
resource sharing policies and relationships. Community Grids are rather based
on donation of resources mostly from private persons. A well-known example of
a Community Grid is SETI@HOME (see also the more detailed description in
chapter 1).
Partner and Community Grids are enabled by specific Grid middleware, which
has the following main functionalities (for a more detailed overview of functionali-
ties necessary to support VOs see chapter 12):
• Virtualization and exposure of IT resources of each participating company to
the VO.
• Support for enforcement of resource sharing policies.
• Coordination of the execution of common processes and workflows. This in
particular involves allocation of shared resources to common tasks.
• Support for enforcement of individual and common security and privacy poli-
cies.
• Support for monitoring of the shared resources.
• Support for metering the usage of the common and shared resources and if
required support for authentication, accounting and payment procedures.
• Optional support for access through browser over a portal interface.
In a Partner/Community Grid each participating partner provides a certain part of
its infrastructure for sharing and either defines the rules under which the resources
can be used by other partners or accepts the community rules for resource dona-
tion. Each participating partner provides access to its IT resources to its partners
and gets access to partners' infrastructure. Common resources (for example results
of common activities) are shared on one of the partners' sites or on external infra-
structure.
The architecture of a Partner/Community Grid can be viewed as a collection
of independent resources (for example Cluster Grids or other resources) intercon-
nected through a global Grid middleware, and accessible, optionally, through a
portal interface (see fig. 3.5).
